On Thu, 25 Aug 2016 17:37:24 -0400, Paul
wrote:

wrote:
In the recent thread "Lenovo T43 (with XP) Wont Power On", I mentioned
that my old Lenovo T43 died. I have given up on fixing that computer
since it's obvious the motherboard is shot.

I bought an identical T43 from ebay, and it is identical, except it came
with 1gb RAM (my old one had 512mb RAM), and a larger HDD. (80gb,
instead of 40gb).

The computer arrived and had XP Pro SP3 installed. That booted up
immediately, and the computer works fine.

The plan was to insert my old HDD, so I could use use it as I had it
configured, with all my software ready to go.

I pulled out the new HDD, and put in the one from my old computer. It
refuses to boot.

That old drive has XP Pro SP3 on it as well.

In Normal Mode it just went to a blank screen and hung there. I get a
whole screen of words saying there are hardware changes. (No ****). But
it's the same model of computer with the only difference being double
the RAM.

You moved a System Builder (OEM) WinXP install from one
machine to another. Kablooie. The difference in the
NIC MAC address should be enough to tip it over.

If both disks were Lenovo Royalty OS installs, that
would not have happened. Those are SLIC activated,
and all they're supposed to check for, is whether
the correct BIOS SLIC table is present.

When playing with computers in this way (doing "spit
swaps"), *always* back up the drive before you put
it in the other computer. I don't know how many
times my bacon was saved, by having a backup
for a "do-over".

*******

The "official" repair route, might be a Repair Install.
Put the old disk in the new computer, boot with the
WinXP SP3 installer CD, and do the Repair Install from
there.

A Repair Install keeps Program files and User data.
You will have to re-install the drivers. You will
have to redo all the Windows Updates since SP3.
In addition, if the original setup had an "advanced"
version of Internet Explorer, you're supposed to
remove that before Repairing. Since that isn't
possible in this case, you install the advanced version
of Internet Explorer after the Repair, and "hope
for the best".

You will also need a valid license key for the
Repair Install. The process isn't clever enough
to "keep" the old key.

Maybe someone else knows of a "magic" way to fix
your situation. I don't know of a way which is less work.
Using the new disk is certainly attractive, but
you'll have to reinstall Office or whatever.
And that might not be a lot of fun either.

Paul


I just had a Compaq sumpin600 crap out and I swapped a drive from a
similar Compaq with no huge issues. I did get the old message of death
that my hardware changed too much for Bill Gates to be happy but when
I linked up to MS, it said "OK go ahead". They have removed all of
that stuff from the authenticating server for XP.
If the OP is having problems, I bet the real problem is the drivers
are so different that it just can't get going. My 2 compaqs were
similar enough that I could get up pretty far before it started
complaining about drivers. I am not sure how you get it going tho.